Anil Manibhai Naik, 72, who has become synonymous with India's engineering behemoth
Larsen & Toubro, completed 50 years at the company this month.

The group executive chairman of L & T is often referred to as Mr. Infrastructure, because of his company’s wide array of projects ranging from roads to oil pipelines to airports and shipyards.

With revenue of $14.3 billion in 2014, L & T has a hand in many of India’s leading projects including the country’s first nuclear-powered submarine; the first monorail in Mumbai and airports in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. It’s also behind critical sections of the metro systems in Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, as well as metro projects in Riyadh and Qatar. (L & T is a major player in the Middle East.)

Naik joined the company in 1965 as a junior engineer in its heavy engineering division. He rose up the corporate ladder becoming chief executive in 1999; chairman in 2003 and group executive chairman in 2012. Naik will be spending another two and a half years at L & T before he retires in 2017.

Since the time he took over in 1999, L & T’s market cap grew from $1.4 billion to $26 billion now. And there’s more to come, as India prepares for a massive infrastructure build-out complete with smart cities.

(L & T was founded in 1938 in Mumbai by two Danish engineers - Henning Holck-Larsen and Soren Kristian Toubro.)

Naik’s current focus is to simplify the conglomerate, which operates in a range of sectors from financial services to water projects, power and ship building. He's looking to unlock value in different divisions either by spinning them off into separate companies or by creating subsidiaries.

Naik, the son of an idealist school teacher, started his life in Mumbai. But his father, who was moved by the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, shifted the family to rural Gujarat, where he started teaching in poor village schools. Naik’s education - after sixth grade - was in these schools, which often had very poor infrastructure marked by cow dung-padded floors.Then came his engineering degree at BVM Engineering College in Gujarat. Naik often takes pride in this journey from a poor village boy to the chairman of a leading conglomerate that he helped build. He told Forbes Asia in a 2009 interview “I am a poor man from a village, who could not even speak English.” (See full story)

But after spending half a century building out India, he can announce grandly: “We make the things that make India proud.” (As he did in his speech during a commemoration ceremony in Mumbai earlier this month.)

I am a contributing editor of Forbes Asia. I cover Indian entrepreneurs and their struggles and successes in their journey to wealth-creation. Previously, I worked as a business reporter for The Dallas Morning News where I revitalized the financial services beat for their a...